"Życie poza kategorią": epistemologia rasy i bunt zoe w prozie H.P. Lovecrafta

“Life beyond category”: the epistemology of race and the revolt of zoe in the prose of H.P. Lovecraft 

Tomasz Jativa proposes an attempt to interpret the poetics of H.P. Lovecraft in the context of the concepts of institutional racism and the rebellion of the zoe. The methodological assumption of the considerations is the belief that in the medium of literature, epistemological structures of ordering the world transform into narrative structures. The establishment of institutional racism involves the geometrization of social life, which means the creation of a hierarchical order of strictly separated classes according to alleged racial characteristics. This geometry can be described using the concepts bios and zoe introduced by Giorgio Agamben. The main thesis is expressed in the belief that the Lovecraftian horror is a biological horror, and the images of intensified zoe on which it is based symbolize the final defeat of racialized biopolitics. It follows that the Cthulhu mythology created by Lovecraft expresses the perspective of a subject who turned racist prejudice into both an epistemology and a political program, and the haunting images of dark deities and tentative monsters emerging from the deep sea symbolize the return of pure life, suppressed under the rule of racial biopolitics. Lovecraft’s obvious racism did not go unnoticed by his readers; the problem, however, lies in the understanding that we are not dealing here with a random biographical fact, but with an essential context that determines both the writing style and the nature of literary creation. Creativity entangled in a racial stereotype turns out to be subject to the same dialectics as it does, and in the end it is exposed to the same contradictions. The end of the reflections will be devoted to the reinterpretations of Lovecraft’s mythos, which critically address its problematic aspects: the concept of cthulucen coined by Donna Haraway, as well as Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft’s Land and the film Cthulhu by Dan Gildark, in which the atmosphere of objective hostility to the world, characteristic of the poetics of the American writer, remains used to talk about experiences of racism and homophobia.